Devika and Intel Help Bring the Party to Coachella

Devika and Intel Help Bring the Party to Coachella

Posted on April 26, 2017

As far as festivals go, Coachella is easily one of the biggest and most well known.

Less well known is the fact that in 2017 Devika helped produce content for one of Coachella’s biggest parties hosted by Republic Records and sbe.

Wait what?

In conjunction with Intel, Devika team members Byron and Sasha helped to produce audio-visual content for the Republic Records x sbe Hyde Away party featuring the New York-based electro-rock duo Phantogram. During Phantogram’s set a complex system was used to mimic the duo’s often trippy, dreamlike music videos in a live-setting.

It took a surprisingly large team to make Phantogram's set happen. Photograph: supplied

Because it’s one thing to create Phantogram’s mind-bending, abstract style in a studio - cit's another thing entirely to recreate it live and in 3D.

Alongside an international team of developers, Devika used the well-known multi-platform game engine Unity to capture and analyse Phantogram’s live tunes. The resulting data was then fed through to the in-house VJs who fed it through further programs before being streamed as visual projections onto massive 180° screens live during Phantogram’s set. The whole setup was so massive and involved that it required computers with 256GB of RAM (the average laptop has 4-8GB) and a backup computer as a fail safe measure.

If all that sounds a bit complicated to you, basically what Devika helped do is turn music and video footage into visual projections in real-time. And the end result looks something like this:

Key to the surreal projections was the use of the Intel RealSense R200 Camera, which allowed the audience to become part of Phantogram’s set. Using its depth-sensing capabilities, the camera live-captured the crowd and created stylised images of them which (using the above method) were projected to the audience on the huge screens.

So no - the Devika team weren’t exactly partying down with guests such as Giorgio Moroder and Kungs. But their work did help make the Phantogram set at the Republic Records x sbe Hyde Away party at Coachella into a ultra-trippy, tech-enhanced spectacular.